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What Was Decided With S3TC & Floating Points For Mesa

03-09-2011, 08:30 AM

Phoronix: What Was Decided With S3TC & Floating Points For Mesa

Last week I mentioned that a developer called for a discussion about merging the OpenGL floating point textures and render targets branch into mainline Mesa. This code has been ready for a while but hasn't been merged due to patent concerns, but to alleviate that while pushing the code forward, the proposed idea was to add a --enable-patented build option. Over the weekend, the discussion continued and it was then also proposed to merge the S3TC texture compression work (another feature where developers are concerned about patent infringement) and to conceal that behind the new build option too. So what happened since and did the work make it into the mainline Mesa Git repository?..

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Damn right. That's why the US residents should finally wake up and do something about it, because "Yes, you can!" and you're most likely the only ones who can.
If you find anything in the current legislation outrageous, stupid or both, simply start urging your representative to change that and don't forget to be persistent, because they just can't ignore the flood of mail and phone calls forever. If only "bothering your congressman with something like this as many times a day as you can" was made into a competition. The only problem might be organizing something like that on a massive scale and that's when social networks come in. I wonder how much longer is it gonna take before sheeple realize the power of democracy, which they're so unwilling to use.
I'm quite sure that many Europeans would love to help, but there's probably not much we can do other than showing our support.

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The S3TC library doesn't have to be present at compile time. You can compile it after compiling Mesa, and Mesa dynamically loads it somehow. It's linked at runtime rather than compile time. I think they use dlopen() ? It has a man page that you can read up on if you're interested.